Many companies have tried making slightly thicker phones with bigger batteries (which many people claim is what they want), no-one buys them. Companies make thinner phones, lots of them get sold.
These companies (mostly) aren't idiots, they do huge amounts of measurements on what people say they want to buy, and what they actually buy.
I always claimed I wanted qwerty keyboard. now blackberry finally has a phone with it that is not selling. the priv.
well, while id kill for a keyboard on android, I'd also need a non-phalet size and open firmware. so I continue to use my keboardless motoX developer edition first gen.
nobody buys phones for one feature. you cant add a thick battery but sel a device with 300x200 screen, which was the case I think you're talking.
I found the Bold keyboard to be fantastic. I could type 60 wpm without looking at the phone.
I found the Droid keyboard to be terrible and unusable.
Not all keyboards are the same, but I do know the best-possible keyboard experience can be far better than the Droid (or any iPhone I've used).
Barebones BB Curve 9310 user here for ~4 years and counting, which replaced a Treo 755p when seemingly everyone had iPhones back in uni. Been meaning to purchase a spare for when this one inevitably hits the pooper. Battery obsolescence is my biggest sustainment worry. QUERTY keyboard requirement has made me a perpetual mobile luddite.
Definitely feels like the last man standing now that our senior-most engineer's wife forced him off his flip phone this past Christmas. Personally don't know anyone who doesn't own a smartphone these days...lonely world.
But few want to pay more for leg room. It's just not much of a benefit compared to the five things I mentioned (and several others like comfortable lounges at hubs -- but not apparently decent food). The airlines want to sell leg room because it's very easy to adjust.
Not that it's on the way to many other countries...
Basically, the problem seems to be that the USA does not have "sterile transit"; if your plane stops there in the way to somewhere else, you have to disembark and go through customs, and you need an expensive visa.
There are no other flights directly between Asia and Latin America (unless you count the EK GRU-DXB flight), though NH may be flying to MEX soon.
On my most recent trip to the US I selected cities that I could get between via train to avoid the entire mess apart from arrival into the US (and made an effort to depart out of Canada).
Among a wide variety of industries, a large portion of revenues come from "upsales", pushing some impulse buys extra like insurance. Which is to say that the impulse buy extras are shitty ripoffs and consumers over time have grown to expect promises to be worthless and to only pay for things they can clearly verify.
And that relates to selling cellphone with longer battery life - all the companies make unrealistic claims, how could someone feel safe giving up something that can see (like a feature or a smaller size) for something they can't see?
I think the airline market hardly ever offers real choices and many things that look like choices end up actually being the same flight sold by different carriers from the same alliance. Alliances are a huge pet peeve of mine anyways. There are certain (US based) airlines I strongly dislike and would like to avoid. However, it's almost impossible. Even if I book another carrier the flight often times end up being operated by them again. Sometimes it gets changed after I book. This is a dysfunctional market. I want Delta and United out of business and I've had the same from others. Yet we are all stuck flying them because we can't avoid it.
Want +3in legroom? For each flight, go to a flight forum and punch in the route to figure out what plane they're flying. Google the airline and that plane to figure out how much legroom is available.
Give up and just fly jetblue and/or southwest, and if they don't go, decline to travel.
1. Flightaware
2. Seatguru
3...
4. Comfortable flying
(Step 3 is becoming a millionaire that flies business class.)
I'm glad Apple didn't go in the same direction and released the iPhone SE, but even they were surprised by the demand for it:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/26/apple-faces-constr...
That said, i wonder how much the "big phone" issue comes from the paradox of wanting slim phones (needs to fit those jeans after all) longer battery life (Wh pr volume is largely a fixed value based on battery chemistry). Stretching the phones on the X and Y then allows a bigger (Wh) battery to be installed.
Never mind that they can also then market it with a higher screen inch number...
On top of that you have things like store commissions, carrier subsidies, and who knows what else, going on between the OEM and the end user that affects the choice of model.
One relative of mind went from a small featurephone to a large smartphone, because another relative had gotten the same one. This with the idea that said other relative would be "tech support".
Big box stores are usually brightly lit (which is usually compounded by having all the light-emitting TVs next to each other, whatever their brightness setting is); human perception of color is strongly influenced by background, and in that environment not having a set configured at the brightest makes it looked dull and washed out rather than seeming like accurate reproduction of color.
This is, of course, very different from what looks good in typical use conditions.
Or, if you could remove battery because of lowered power consumption of components (and then make the phone smaller) just Keep the battery the same size.
I would not bet anything on phone companies marketeers ability to run multi-dimensional hypothesis tests on the market. And I do actively doubt they have any intention to, given the opportunity cost they'll pay at the beginning of such test, and how long the test results will probably stay valid.
The idea that the Market is an all knowing beast always operating at maximum efficiency is hilarious.
I'm yet to see a person who'd say "You know what? It would be cool if the new phones had heart-rate sensors.". It's always "oh, they put a heart-rate sensor in that phone, cool.". Driven by what manufacturers do, not what the consumers want.
Also the fact that people end up buying something different than they were initially requesting doesn't help to put more weight on their suggestions. But if you don't hear people asking for features, you're not listening all too closely.
Before that I owned every Droid qwerty slider including the elusive Droid 3. I love the form factor mainly because once extended the phone becomes a very natural reading/typing device not unlike some of the early PDAs. The keyboard was getting better with each iteration and Droid 4 was probably the best phone I have ever used for remote management with the row of dedicated numbers keys. We have all lost something when qwerty sliders faded out of the mainstream.
The closest thing I've seen is the S7 Active. It looks good, but I'm on T-Mobile, so it wouldn't be a great idea to get one.
I haven't seen a market that's more driven by what is being put for sale than mobile phones. People don't choose shit, they pick from the few somewhat cost-effective options that are available any given year.
I doubt the technology to have higher density and more energy efficient battery is far off, but I fail to see any report of mass manufacturing of these, only article about new technology advancement in labs. And if there is no incentive from buyers (the device manufacturer) for better parts (in this case the battery), then the alternative is just have something that is good enough and that won't be dwarfed by the competition.
Also, when buying a smartphone, they rarely think "I should go for the uglier one, with a bigger battery", but after they notice how often they run out of battery, they'll buy an external one.